OER1123 Oral Presentation ppt

Thursday 12 May 14.30 Breakout Room 4/4a

LORO: fostering professional development through OER

Anna Comas-Quinn & Tita Beaven, Department of Languages, Faculty of Education and Language Studies, The Open University

Conference Theme: Collaboration and communities

Abstract: LORO (Languages Open Resources Online) http://loro.open.ac.uk) is an online repository developed with JISC funding at the Department of Languages, The Open University, UK. It enables users to store, manage, share and easily access resources for language teaching and learning, and to exploit, remix and extend resources created by others. The idea of such a repository was perceived to be beneficial by language professionals in terms of professional development, time saving, showcasing own work and student support. LORO currently holds over 1500 individual resources, has around 450 registered users, and receives hundreds of visits a week from all over the world. The resources cover French, German, Spanish, Italian, Welsh, Chinese and English for Academic Purposes, and include both Open University tutorial resources and those uploaded by individual teachers.
This paper focuses on how being members of the LORO OER community has impacted on the teaching practices of users and on their self-perception as teachers. Drawing on quantitative data from pre- and post-project questionnaires and on qualitative data from focus groups and one-to-one interviews with LORO users, we analyse the motivation and incentives for sharing, using and reusing OER, and the way in which social media might contribute to the development of this professional community. We believe that OER repositories can be a catalyst for transforming pedagogy, supporting collaboration, and starting new conversations about teaching practices (Petrides et al, 2010), and examine the extent to which social media might be instrumental in achieving this.

Keywords: oer; pedagogy; community; professional practice; teaching repository

References:

Petrides, L.; Jimes, C.; Middleton-Detzner, C. et al. (2010). OER as a Model for Enhanced Teaching and Learning. In Open ED 2010 Proceedings. Barcelona: UOC, OU, BYU. Available at:  http://hdl.handle.net/10609/4995